Tag Archives: Gini coefficient

Guest post. The French version can be found here. Special thanks to Serge Boucher for the translation

We’ve shown in the first part of this post that a population of actors effecting “random walks” by betting their wealth daily, or more precisely a modest part of their fortune that lies above the poverty level, will eventually see a small group of “very rich” emerge, making everybody else comparatively poorer.

We now increase the number of actors to N=3600, all other hypotheses remaining the same, to get a more clear distinction between a continuum of the society and a few dominant elements. We’ll show how a small dose of “Pikettisation” avoids paralysis.

Guest post. The French version can be found here. Special thanks to Serge Boucher for the translation

On the subject of wealth concentration and rising inequalities, Thomas Piketty tells us that there is indeed a growing rift, and that the fifties were only an exception. One can always pretend that the Gilded Age gave us several decades of only occasionally rusty capitalism, hence reviving those levels of inequality is nothing to scoff at, especially if millions of people concurrently rise out of poverty.

Entertaining that view requires that we ignore many aspects of the Great Depression, which is highly difficult to understand, having taken place between two world wars, and in a period mixing technical progress, colonisation and then decolonisation. In any case, one can conceivably believe that history as a whole is so chaotic that what we’ll get at the end of the current rise in inequality need not be exceptionally bad.

Many reasons, which one might wish to file under “our planet’s survival”, suggest that now is a horrible time for deadlocking a system already made rusty by wealth concentration and the mass poverty that it implies: even though a sizeable and growing middle-class manages to get by, a world where even in rich countries 30% of inhabitants are poor, with poor countries doing much worse, can’t be expected to make the right choices regarding our planet’s resources.